Although animating with deformers is a commonly used technique in the VFX industry, a lot of people dont know about it’s benefits. Well, after this tutorial that’s going to change. We’ll be looking at how to animate complex expressions with deformers, along with why they can be extremely useful. Enjoy!

Animation can be a nightmare if you don’t have an easy to use, well-made rig to work with, and in this tutorial Donato Marotta shows us how to create just that using joints, locators, custom attributes, set driven keys, expressions and constraints in Maya!

In this 3 part Maya workflow tutorial you will learn how to model, texture, and render a Katana, the legendary Samurai sword. For the modeling portion, we will use Maya’s basic polygon editing tools, while UVlayout will be used to create the UVs, and of course Photoshop to create the textures. We will also briefly cover Mental Ray for rendering the final image.